Columns

The S.C. legislature is battling over infrastructure improvements in our state. It’s part of a wider debate on how to become truly prosperous, with opportunity for all.
The “conservative solution” is to cut spending, taxes, regulations and government and not raise the minimum wage. Get government out of the way, and personal responsibility and the free market will create prosperity for all. Some seem to believe that government is bad and cannot do anything right.

This is a response to various recent articles about Billy McCoy, plagiarism, and Barry Faile.
Starting with the editor’s column, written by Brian Melton, excuse me if my punctuation in this column is “not” correct, or not up to your standards. I have not found any job descriptions for sheriff that list proper punctuation to be a job requirement.
Who are you to determine if Mr. McCoy is a “respectable candidate”? Have you interviewed him? That’s something for the voters to decide.

We all want our children to do better in school, so education reform is a predictable hobbyhorse. And yet, few offer ideas beyond throwing money at the problem or reducing classroom sizes.
As the son of an educator dad and literacy-coach mom, I offer simple steps to enhance education in South Carolina’s Fifth District, five vital skills required for 21st century success.

Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and others have the right to cancel their concerts in North Carolina just because they believe that the state’s HB2 law is discriminatory.
I also believe people and businesses have the right not to do business with people of different beliefs.

The National Association of Letter Carriers will hold its Stamp Out Hunger food drive May 14. Lancaster postal employees will again participate in this national effort, with your help.
Now in its 24th year, Stamp Out Hunger! is the nation’s largest single-day food drive. Last year, letter carriers collected 70.6 million pounds of food from postal customers across the country, bringing the total donations to more than 1.4 billion pounds of food collected along postal routes since the drive began.

It just keeps getting more and more interesting and perplexing. I am just not quite sure what to make of it all.
The list continues to grow of businesses across the country that have been sued or threatened with lawsuits because they refused to provide services for individuals/couples who are openly gay. Some businesses have closed because of this, at least temporarily.

Some states are known for things they produce in abundance. Idaho has potatoes, Maine has lobsters and South Carolina seems to have more than our fair share of politicians with loopy, if not downright embarrassing, ideas.
This is not really new for the Palmetto State as we have a long history of such loopy ideas – secession, printing our own currency, denying children an education based on their skin color, etc. – and these are just the things proposed in the last few years.
And now we are at it again.

Many, if not most, South Carolina state lawmakers have a peculiar understanding of the separation of powers. For them, the principle seems to mean that all powers should be removed from the executive and judicial branches and concentrated in the legislature.

Billy McCoy and his band of merry plagiarizers came up with a head-scratcher of an explanation.
Yes, they acknowledged, we copied almost every word of an N.C. police department’s strategic plan and called it our own, but that’s not plagiarism. And besides, every law enforcement agency in America does this, so who cares?

I encounter angry people often in this job, and that’s OK.
Usually it’s because of something we published, like a recent story about a young man charged with several violent crimes. His mother called to scream at me that we had no right to drag him through the mud this way, that we should wait to see if he’s convicted. I listened for a while, but when she started repeating herself, I told her I understood why she was angry and said goodbye.